Clinton: Trump Is A Danger To America

Hillary Clinton, who warned voters during last year’s presidential race that Donald Trump was a “danger to America,” has not changed her opinion.

On Tuesday’s “Pod Save America” podcast, the defeated Democratic nominee defended her campaign’s decision to continually slam Trump rather than focus on her proposals. Clinton described the strategy as a tough decision, but said she feared that her positions on the issues were “just not competitive with the reality TV show.” She was referring to Trump’s involvement with programs like “The Apprentice” and the “Miss Universe” pageant.

“We tried so many different ways to break through that,” Clinton recalled. “And we did, of course, advertise what we saw as the threats that Trump posed to the country, because frankly, we thought — and I still believe — he’s a clear and present danger to America. And I would have been less than responsible if I didn’t talk about that. But we tried to do both. We tried to make the case for both, and I’d be the first to tell you, it was difficult to break through. … I think Trump, left to his own devices, unchecked, would become even more authoritarian than he has tried to be.”

Yahoo News noted that Clinton kept herself out of the public eye for weeks following her election loss, which shocked the political and media establishments. Her first high-profile appearance was at Trump’s inauguration in January. Recently, Clinton has been making speeches and doing interviews on news shows to promote her newly published book about the election, “What Happened?”

Clinton claims in the memoir that a number of people, other than herself, were responsible for her failure to succeed in a race nearly everyone expected the former secretary of state to win. On the podcast, Clinton doubled down on the book’s bashing of Bernie Sanders, her opponent in the battle for the Democratic nomination. She wrote that the Vermont senator was “impugning my character” and causing “lasting damage” to her presidential ambitions when he questioned her large corporate contributions and lavish speaking fees. Clinton argued that Sanders was “making it harder to unify progressives” to beat Trump.

She also has blamed the election outcome on the FBI, the Russians, misogyny and other factors. The book ridicules former FBI Director James Comey, who continued to oversee the bureau’s investigation of Clinton’s email practices throughout nearly the entire the presidential campaign. He publicly accused Clinton of having been “extremely careless” in handling classified government information when she used a private email server while heading the State Department. Just 10 days before the election, Comey announced that the bureau had re-opened the email probe, though he later acknowledged that agents had found no incriminating information.

Clinton clearly believes allegations by U.S. intelligence agencies that Russian operatives were behind last summer’s cyberattacks on her campaign chairman and the Democratic National Committee. The stolen emails, which WikiLeaks released, contained embarrassing information about the Democrats. The revelation that party officials conspired with the Clinton campaign to derail Sanders’ presidential bid led to the resignation of the DNC chairwoman, Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz of Florida.